A friend recently told me about nihongoresources.com. It looks like it has a number of things of interest to students of the Japanese language:

Beginners Lessons

12 lessons for complete beginners (currently only the first 4 are done). Looks like you need to spend a bit of time getting confortable with hiragana and katakana first, which is intimidating but I think is definitely a good idea.

Dictionaries

General Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionaries, as well as dictionaries for kanji, names, particles, and even onomatopoeia. These are (of course) based off the work of Jim Breen, who provides the excellent wwwjdic that I currently use.

Jouyou kanji lists

The 1945 standard kanji that Japanese are supposed to learn by the time they finish high school. The lists are broken into levels 1-6, plus general use, and the site allows you to customise the amount of information shown about each kanji (currently only level 1 allows customisation).

But the highlight of the site (at least for me)…

Grammar Book

An amazing Introduction to Japanese Syntax, Grammar and Language that’s 285 pages long, and must have taken a huge amount of effort to produce. Based on the author’s study of Japanese at University, it looks like a very useful reference, especially for intermediate or advanced students. I’ll be using this to try to check and re-enforce my understanding of some of the tricky areas of the language (most of it really!). If only I knew enough English< grammar to understand all the terms he uses!

You can download a pdf copy from the “books” section of the site, or read it online.

Well worth a look…

As always, がんばってね！

Updated May 2007: as Pomax (the author of the site) notes, the onomatopoeia dictionary is his own work. I’ve also updated the online link to the grammar book.